The Moment
by Faux Pax
Summary: Immortality is as much a curse as a blessing, especially for an ex-shadowhunter. Most cut all ties with the past and try to make a new life amongst others who have eternity. But Stephen Herondale is about to learn that the past will always come knocking and that second chances may not be as impossible as one would think. Post CoG.


Isa stood, watching as arms and legs hit the training dummy in a cacophony of savage drum beats, each one fiercer than the last, until she was sure the steel would snap. It never did, and she could tell he had been at this for hours unending. He wasn't one to sit still, especially when there was something to be done.

She had never really understood why he insisted on keeping up with his training. He was no longer a shadowhunter, no longer welcomed in the glass city he had once called home, but still, every day he could be seen practicing some skill that had been drilled into him since infancy. It wasn't always hand to hand. He had bows, knives, and although he could no longer use the glowing serif blades that his kind had held so dear, he had found no trouble in wielding ordinary iron and steel blades.

Isa understood him a bit better now that she knew first hand just how addicting it could be. In the decades she had been one of the immortal, one of the undead, she had often enjoyed the use of the strength it provided, but there was something else to be said for the pride and exhilaration that came with skill, rather than just pure power.

He could try and say the continuous practice was just a habit left over from his old life, try and push away all her doubts with a single blue eyed smile, but she knew better. There were things in this world that you were just born for and, for him; it was no longer an option.

"You should have come." It was a whispered thing and she hadn't really meant to say it, but that didn't make it any less true.

His rhythm didn't falter but the muscles in his shoulders tensed as he gave a particularly brutal hit. Her heightened senses could hear the micro cracking of the metal.

"We've been over this," he said and Isa could hear his jaw tightening.

"I know."

Isa looked down at the thin white scars that crisscrossed the back of her hand. At first she hadn't wanted him to come; there were some things she had to see for herself, some truths she would not get with him there. He had always been something of a mystery to her; when he first realized that he couldn't go home, he had looked both freed and oddly shattered, as if Idrys had been both his hell and heaven.

In the years since, she had learned a couple things about his past, most gleaned from the hand full of off handed comments and the fact that he often muttered in his sleep. Form there Isa painted a picture of the man who shared her bed, vague and abstract.

"I got you something."

He stopped moving and turned to look at her as she dug through her thick canvas book bag. Although her eyes were focusing on the contents of her bag, she could still see his face, the fallen angle cheekbones tense and lips slightly parted.

Isa held out the bundle of yellowing paper, tied so tight with a thick black ribbon that the center crinkled. He stood for a long moment, staring at her offering before reaching out with a trembling hand. In the chaos that came that night, it hadn't been too difficult to sneak into the abandoned manor and retrieve them. Of course, it hadn't hurt that the letters had been one of the reasons she went to begin with and had come prepared with the help of a warlock friend.

She had thought that maybe the letters would help him find closure, and she owed him that at the very least. Maybe if she just brought back the letters…

Out of all the things he tried to forget, all the regrets he had, this was the one he could never quite put behind him. Until the fight, Isa hadn't known if the letters were from a girlfriend or wife, or what. All she knew was that it was her name he called out in his sleep, not Isa's.

That was why, in a selfish way, as surprised as she was at his refusal, she had been glad he decided not to come. It had given her an opportunity to gaze into the life he left behind—the life she took from him—and see just why, as close as they had gotten, he was always just out of reach.

He took the letters gingerly and sat on the edge of the bed staring at the bundle with a profound mixture of horror and wonder.

"I didn't read them." She had wanted to. Oh god has she had wanted to, even going so far as to try and carefully pull one from the middle, but she couldn't bring herself to do it, and not just because of him.

Isa had met the woman who carried his name, middle aged now, with a dusting of gray in her hair and a sadness that had crawled its way into her bones. But despite all this there was a quiet strength to her. When that little red headed girl had announced that she could make runes that would work on downworlders, that she could bind them together into a singular fighting force, Isa had approached the woman that had haunted her and asked to share in that strength.

It had been mechanistic but Isa had to know who held his heart and why, in a lot of ways, being with him was like being with a widower, perfect and happy but still haunted by someone he could never be with. The worst part was that Isa had actually really liked her. In another life, in another set of circumstances, she could imagine them being friends, sitting down for tea, gossiping and telling embarrassing stories about mutual acquaintances. Isa would be the more the less refined of the two, the one more likely to be blunt and possibly a little crude.

There had been a moment when Isa had almost confessed her crime, and told her new friend that what she lost wasn't quite as dead as she believed. But then Isa had thought about the angle faced boy that shared her bed and couldn't go through with it.

When she had gotten Magnus's message about the battle, she had assumed there would be no question as to if they would help or not...but that was the thing about assumptions, the things taken most for granted are often the things that are most surprising.

It didn't matter to her that the rest of the vampires had refused to fight. Raphael Santiago did not speak for her and she was no fool. Whatever petty politics had held him back meant little in the grand scheme of things. Downworldsers were pretty high on Valentine's shit list and if he wasn't stopped there wasn't a thing in this world that would keep him from walking over their corpses as the entire world burned.

And so she fought. As much as her boy had wanted to join her—and she wasn't blind, she knew he did—he hadn't been able to bring himself to go.

As shocked as Isa had been, though, she understood. She remembered standing outside the window of her family's house, the first Christmas after she turned, and watching them together, missing her, knowing there was nothing she could do to help. The snow hadn't bothered her, but the truth chilled her to her core. There was no way to explain what happened to her and not have them think her a monster. There was no way to pretend and despite all the issues between them, she only ever wanted what was best.

The choice after that had been easy. For everyone's sakes, it was better if they thought she was dead.

After that she had trouble going anywhere close to home again. Even when everyone she knew had grown old and passed from this world into the next, even when buildings began climbing higher and higher, their roofs caressing the sky like a lover's fingers, and the whole area was no longer recognizable as home.

Idris, however, hadn't changed and Isa sincerely doubted that made it any easier for him to return.

"We won." She sat down beside him and waited for him to look up from the papers. He never did.

"I doubt you would have been able to come back if you didn't. Valentine isn't exactly one for mercy," he said, eyes still glued to the bundle in his hands. His voice was still full of wonder and shock, only now it was laced with a bit of well-earned bitterness and hatred.

Her heart dropped. It was the perfect lead in to the real reason she had rushed back so quickly after the fight and the real reason she, in hindsight, wished he had come even if that would have denied her the chance to satisfy her curiosity. Then he would know. Then she wouldn't have to be the one to tell him this hard, horrible truth.

For a time, as she had made her way back to the large, sparsely decorated apartment they shared, she had debated whether or not to even say the words. Eighty-five years of life experience did not make her a fool; she could see how this would all end for her…for him. Heartbreak was guaranteed….but, as much crap had already been let out of the bag, there was always hope. Just not for her.

Isa knew what the words would do to him, how they would shatter him as cleanly as frozen glass, and, as much as she would like to pretend otherwise, there were some less altruistic reasons behind her silence. He had been the first person in all those years to make eternity not seem so long or so boring and with these words, these rumors, she would lose him.

In the end, she couldn't do it. She wouldn't have been able to look at him every day knowing she had kept something like this from him. He deserved better.

"I heard rumors."

It was a simple statement but she couldn't bring herself to elaborate, the actual words digging into her throat like trying to cough up glass.

For the first time he looked up from the mementoes of his past, his striking blue eyes measuring her, obviously trying to figure out what was going on behind her uncharacteristic hesitancy.

"Isa," he breathed, almost begging, almost begging her not to continue. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to hear about anything that could remind him of that life. She could hear it in his voice. the letters were one thing—a reminder of what had once been, not unlike if she had brought him a photo album—but news would just remind him of what he couldn't be there for.

Isa looked down at the picture on her cell phone. A single, grainy image taken from afar of a boy with golden hair and the same fallen angel cheekbones of the man beside her.

When she had first heard the whispers, the ones that interested few other downworlders, besides highlighting the cruelty and depravity that existed within Valentine, she had been suspicious, ready to blow off the truth. Ready to deny what it would mean and pretend she had never heard. It would be easier that way. She would lose less that way.

And then she saw him, Jace he was called, and could not deny the truth and snapped a picture, thankful that although cell reception was non-existent in the hidden country, the other facilities of the device worked. If she hadn't heard the rumors first, she wouldn't have seen the resemblance, but she had heard, and as she looked, she could not deny the truth.

"Don't Stephen," she breathed, her voice cracking, begging him not to make this harder on her then it already was destined to be, "you might want to sit down."


End file.
